The Prawn Season

It is a time between seasons, of endless
warm winds pouring across the concentrating
salts of the inland sea. After each drunken night
of arguments and fights, shopkeepers hose and

scrub dried blood from pavements and steps.
The last hot rushes of a stormy summer
jangle broken window glass—it is the season for
ice buckets topped with prawns in restaurant

windows—pink meat fried in heavy black pans
with rice and clams. The owner of a long line
of wire pots that squat on the bottom of the bay
drags his boat down the slope and rows to

the flagged buoys. The wrigglers in pots
crackle and fizz as they dry, they are the
stragglers missed by dredgers and trawlers.
He is the owner and for forty years

he’s picked his favourites in the expanding village—
there’s a smack for anyone caught messing with
those pots. His thin grey hair flaps back to flash
a sun-spotted scalp. The boat cracks on hard waves

carved by endless flows of storms and wind.
He empties another pot of sand-speckled dabs
and blood red prawns—blennies and the other thorny
fish are chopped for bait. Back on shore he starts

a driftwood and pine root fire that roars
with wind pouring towards the village’s
closing shutters. After heating pebbles in the fire
he uses tongs to tap them clean then drops them

into a pot of fresh water that hisses and boils
in seconds. The blood-shot prawns drain to pink
in swirls of bright green sea lettuce. He sips
the gritty liquid, chews the soft bodies of hundreds

of prawns. The sea wind blows him home, his pan
clangs as he runs past people in bars chinking
glasses laughing and ordering plates of prawns
just brought in by the trawlers. One minute he’s sat

outside his house cleaning his boots, the next
he’s running barefoot through puddles at the edge
of the track scraping up fistfuls of mud and throwing
it down the endless wind to his neighbour’s house.

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